“Well?” Julius asked me, as we strolled across the pastures that skirted the main forest, “and does it seem anywhere familiar to you--the three of us together again? You recall--how much?” A rather wistful smile passed over his face, but the eyes were grave. He was in earnest if ever man was. “She doesn’t seem wholly a stranger to you?”
My mind searched carefully for words. To refer to any of my recent impressions was difficult, even painful, and frank discussion of my friend’s wife impossible--though, probably, there was nothing Julius would not have understood and even welcomed.
“I--cannot deny,” I began, “that somewhere--in my imagination, perhaps, there seems----”
He interrupted me at once. “Don’t suppress the imaginative pictures--they’re memory. To deny them is only to forget again. Let them come freely in you.”
“Julius----!” I exclaimed, conscious that I flushed a little, “but she is wonderful; superior, too, in some magnificent way to--any----”
“Lady,” he came abruptly to my assistance, no vestige of annoyance visible.
“To anyone of our own class,” I completed the sentence more to my liking. “I admit I feel drawn to her--in a kind of understanding sympathy--though how can I pretend that I--that this sense of familiarity is really memory?” It was impossible to treat him lightly; his belief was his life, commanding a respect due to all great convictions of the soul. “You have found someone you can love,” I went on, aware that it gave me no pleasure to say it, “and someone who loves you. I--am delighted.”
He turned to me, standing hatless, the sunlight in his face, his eyes fixed steadily upon my own.
“We had to meet--all three,” he said slowly; “sooner or later. It’s an old, old debt we’ve got to settle up together, and the opportunity has come at last. I only ask your sympathy--and hers.” He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “To you it may seem a small thing, and, if you have no memory, a wild, impossible thing as well, even with delusion in it. But nothing is really small.” He paused. “I only ask that you shall not resist.” And then he added gravely: “The risk is mine.”
I felt uneasiness; the old schooldays’ basis of complete sincerity was not in me quite. I had lived too long in the world of ordinary men and women. His marriage seemed prompted by an impersonal sense of justice to the universe rather than by any desire for the companionship and sweetness that a woman’s love could give him. For a moment I knew not what to say. Could such a view be hers as well? Had she yielded herself to him upon a similar understanding? And if not--the thought afflicted me--might not this debt he spoke of have been discharged without claiming the whole life of another in a union that involved also physical ties?